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First beta of KDE 4.7 arrives for testing

The KDE Community has announced the arrival of a first beta of version 4.7 of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC), a development preview of the next major release of this popular Linux and Unix desktop manager. According to the developers, the final release of KDE SC 4.7.0 is expected to arrive on 27 July 2011.

KDE SC 4.7 Beta 1 features improvements to KWin, the window manager for the KDE Plasma Desktop, adding support for OpenGL-ES 2.0 and improving its overall performance on mobile devices. User interface changes have been made to the Dolphin file manager which have improved file metadata searching. The Marble virtual globe application, which is similar to Google Earth, now supports offline address search. KDE's login manager, KDM (KDE Display Manager), now works with the Grub2 boot loader. The developers note that API, dependency and feature freezes are in effect and that the team is now focused on "fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality".

The KDE Plasma Desktop Workspace.
Source: kde.org
As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they find.

KDE is licensed under a combination of the LGPLv2, BSD, MIT and X11 licences for core libraries and the GPLv2 or GPLv3 for applications. The latest stable release is KDE SC 4.6.3, a maintenance update from earlier this month.